


the somewhere part

by bog gremlin (tomatocages)



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Cryptid Shiro (Voltron), Demisexual Keith (Voltron), Kissing, M/M, Navajo Keith (Voltron), Quintessence-Sensitive Keith (Voltron), Size Difference, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-16
Updated: 2020-09-16
Packaged: 2021-03-06 14:20:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,166
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26130295
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tomatocages/pseuds/bog%20gremlin
Summary: Keith leaves the Navajo Nation in search of the supernatural. Settling in on the Mogollon Rim with his dog and a sheet he tacks up on the wall of his cabin, he starts looking for a cryptid rumored to live nearby.He finds Shiro.
Relationships: Keith/Shiro (Voltron)
Comments: 61
Kudos: 152
Collections: Sheith Prompt Party 2020





	the somewhere part

**Author's Note:**

> "Well, now that we have seen each other," said the unicorn, "if you believe in me, I'll believe in you."  
>  _Alice in Wonderland_ , Lewis Carroll

Monsters have never been a faraway thing for Keith. He grew up hearing stories about demons and monsters and spirits, and he’s spent enough time up in the mountains of Arizona to know that there’s something living in the land that cannot be explained by textbook or scientific rationale. Everyone knows that; Keith’s just a little odd about it, even for a rez kid. He always did go looking for the creatures that shy away from human contact. It makes sense that he’s going to keep at it as summer wanes into autumn and his dad helps him pack up the car. 

The Subaru is almost as old as Keith is, but it runs fine. His dad slams the hood closed and gives it a couple pats, leaving his big handprints in the dust clinging to the paint. It might have been brown, once, but the dust has pretty much permanently turned it red. “You’re all set,” he says. “Need money for gas?”

“I’ll be okay,” Keith replies. His parents don’t have a lot of money — no one does, at home — and Keith has spent the last couple years saving a percentage of his firefighting pay to fund this trip. “Mom with the sheep?”

“It’s five in the goddamn morning,” Chet says. “Of course she’s with the sheep. She left your dog for you.”

The dog in question is sitting on top of Keith’s left foot, the way she always does when at rest. Keith raised her from a puppy and his mother insists that he spoiled her for actual work; really, though, Krolia just doesn’t have the vocabulary to be tender about it. Keith will miss her. She’s not the kind of woman who will ever send an email, and his parents don’t even have electricity at home, let alone a computer or cell phones. Calls are made strictly at the diner in town. 

Bringing the dog with him on this nebulous quest is a sentimental gesture on both Keith's part and on his mother’s. The dog is one of those mixed-breed rez mutts that looks halfway like a coyote and the other half like an animal shelter poured into a blender. She doesn’t really fit in the car. Keith doesn’t have a lot of stuff, which helps; the dog clambers into the front seat and overflows from the passenger side and onto Keith’s thigh. The dog is the touchiest member of Keith’s little family; his dad doesn’t hug him, and his mother is either out with the sheep or knelt inside, weaving her rugs and ignoring everything else. Keith’s used to it, and he loves his family, but: this is part of why leaving isn’t cause for heartbreak. 

—

Keith gets into the car and starts driving. He doesn’t have a map; he has a vague notion of which roads to take. Mostly, he follows the pull that’s settled in his spine. 

Arizona unrolls before him as he leaves the Navajo Nation. As he heads south into the state — the parts where there are trees and rivers and looming bluffs — he rolls the window down and lets the dog lean dangerously across his lap to stick her head out the driver’s side. 

A lot of the time, Keith feels like he’s just leaning into the feeling, the same way you’re supposed to lean into the curve of the road when you’re on a bike. It’s been with him since he was a kid, but it’s gotten stronger over the past couple of years, building in intensity until one of his uncles finally told him to pack a bag and follow it. 

“Not doing you any favors here, kid,” Kolivan had said. He was chattier than either of Keith’s parents, which wasn’t saying much. He was taller than them too, which was; Krolia was six-eight. “You get the call, you go with it.”

It wasn’t anything Keith hadn’t already been thinking, but it worked as a proverbial kick to the ass. He’d hunted down the Subaru a week later and paid for it by helping Ulaz and Antok Bluehouse build a new barn.

The town he ends up in, settled in the nooks and crannies of the Mogollon Rim — even Keith hesitates to call it a town; it’s _barely_ a designated census place — is notable for two reasons. First, there’s an old shack Keith can squat in without bothering any locals; and second, over the past seventy years, there have been consistent and inconclusive sightings of some great creature. Possibly it’s the so-called Mogollon Monster, even if Keith generally scorns the idea of dead People haunting settlers. Keith’s ancestors might have suffered, but he’s pretty sure they’d think spending more time with white people would be a waste.

But that doesn’t dismiss the sightings, and there are any number of cryptids that walk the earth. Keith is determined to find one of them, even if he never publishes his own theories. That’s not the point. The Mogollon Monster is supposed to be a creature born from resentment, taller than a man and determined to haunt the land it’s tied to. It’s supposed to have glowing eyes, and big teeth, and claws. Teeth and claws don’t scare Keith; he’s used to sheep, and they’re meaner than any predator he’s come across. 

When he finds the shack, he unpacks the Subaru faster than he packed it. The dog is of little help. She springs out of the vehicle in order to trip him three times in quick succession before shoving past the unlocked door to the shack and oozing out over the floor in her best impression of a skinned animal rug. She’s always wanted to live indoors, Keith thinks; but his mother never let the dogs inside their house. 

Well, Keith didn’t bring her along so she could work. She’s already proved she doesn’t much care for sheep — he doesn’t blame her — so why would herding cryptids be any different?

He tacks a plain sheet up on the north wall of the shack. It’s a clean slate: he’ll fill it soon. 

—

The thing about the Mogollon Monster is: it’s made up. There is no such thing. No towering creature with claws and fangs and glowing eyes, no entity made up of angry Diné souls. Realistically, the reports of the creature are probably from drunks hallucinating in the early hours, or kids who don’t have anything better to do once they’ve skipped school. It could even be an animal — but Keith doubts it. 

He’s seen monsters before. When he was a kid, spending summers helping his mom with the sheep and spinning the wool so she could do her weaving — a lot of the time, monsters were just tourists, or social workers. They smiled too much and took too many photographs to remember their “Indian vacation” by, and they always wanted to talk to him. Keith used to sit on a rock outside their little house, whistling commands at the dogs and making shitty yarn with a hip spindle for the tourists. He’d listen for the ghost stories that blew through town every now and again, and which he liked better than monsters anyway. These stories were in shorter supply, probably because they were real in a way that white people asking after native traditions simply _weren’t_. They mostly appeared in the shape of old people gathering outside by the bonfire and talking about the old days, before relocation, or the sad days, when the children had gone off to boarding school. Keith thought of them as ghosts because they were no longer present, not in the same way as the feeling he got down his spine when he went looking for real monsters. He didn’t go hunting for supernatural creatures much, because he was young, and there was spinning to be done; but he thought about it. 

He didn’t much care for the spinning, which left a film of lanolin on his fingers and softened his calluses, but no one had ever asked him if he wanted to do the work. 

“That’s not how work gets done,” Keith’s dad was fond of saying. Chet was a smokejumper who spent most summers putting out fires, and he was accustomed to tasks that got doled out with life or death as a distinct possibility, no in-between spaces to get caught in.

Chet hadn’t really understood his only son, but that didn’t matter. Krolia used to put her hand on his elbow and shush him whenever he tried to convince Keith to play with the other kids, or at least pretend he was interested in playing a pickup round of basketball. 

“Shh, Chester,” she’d say — Keith’s mother was the only person who ever called Chet by his full name — “he’s listening to something.” 

“I just want to make sure he doesn’t have the wind blowing around between empty ears,” his dad would answer. He didn’t mean anything by it. Keith has doubted many things over the years, but he’s never doubted that his parents love him, in the ways that they know best.

That might have been why Keith joined Chet, on the fire line. To feel danger in person, and compare it to the creeping prickle of something waiting in the wild. 

The fires hadn’t felt anything like that, though. Just hot. At the end of every shift, he and his dad would drag themselves back to the bunkhouse and sleep like the dead. 

Keith worked the line for a couple of seasons and put money aside, and in the winter he helped his mother with her weaving, and all the while — he waited for the right time.

—

It takes a solid week for Keith to cave and head into town for additional supplies. He’d like to spend more time out seeking; already, the sheet on the cabin wall is dotted with theories and linked threads. It sounds more put-together than it is, since Keith’s using the spit-spliced lengths of wool too short to weave with to make the lines, and they bobble and twist against the faded checked fabric. The sun comes through the window with a vengeance every morning. Even after a week, Keith can tell the sheet will be bleached white before he leaves. 

He’s filling his water tank outside the hardware store when he feels the pull, but when he looks up, there’s nothing out of the ordinary on the street. Well, mostly. There’s a stranger walking towards Keith, which is unusual only because Keith’s got a case of what his father calls “resting sheep-face,” where he looks stoic and unflappable and a little mean. He doesn’t invite a lot of conversation. 

“You’re new around here,” the stranger says, and Keith looks up at him. He’s tall, but in a reasonable way. He’s good-looking, which is less reasonable, and Keith feels his heart stutter in his chest. He promptly loses his grip on the water jug and barely avoids spilling half the contents on the pavement.

“I am,” Keith says, eyes down as he fumbles with the spout. “New. For a while.”

“Everyone’s new until they aren’t,” the stranger says, and shuts off the spigot just before the water can overflow from the canister. Water-conscious; that’s a good quality. “I’m Shiro — the other new guy. My grandparents weren’t from around here, so I’m saddled as an outsider for life.”

“The nerve,” Keith manages. Somehow, on the journey from the spigot back to his side, Shiro’s hand has found Keith’s; the handshake is firm, and isn’t properly a handshake. It lasts too long, and the pressure’s off, probably because it’s a prosthetic. Not a fancy one; just a stiff hand covered in silicone skin that someone has doodled rocket ships and constellations on, so the ink has bled purple and faded at the edges. The fingers are articulated, and there’s some kind of feedback — Shiro gives Keith a little squeeze, before he lets go — but even so, it’s hardly the most remarkable thing about him. 

“I’m Keith,” Keith offers, belated. “I’m — researching some local history.”

“Thrilling,” Shiro says. He hasn’t stepped back, and his intrusion into Keith’s personal space is wonderful. “Why don’t you tell me about it over a drink. The owner of the greatest — and only — bar around will probably offer something on the house.” He winks, broadly, and jabs a thumb at his own broad chest. “Me. I’m the owner. C’mon, I’ll tell you the local scuttlebutt before old Mrs. Lee at the hardware store gets her claws into you.” 

There are people who show up and, without much fuss, change your life. Keith has a feeling — another one, on top of that longing pressing up into his spine — that Shiro is one of them. 

The bar isn’t cozy, or even poorly-lit. It has big windows that face the town on one side and the stunning rise of the Mogollon Rim on the other, and the light comes through like it’s kicking open a door. There aren’t any curtains to speak of. The light does a good job of highlighting the bones of Shiro’s face, not that he needed a spotlight for that.

Shiro braces his arms on a worn countertop that looks suspiciously like the top of an old kitchen table, just repurposed, and hoists himself up and behind it. It makes his triceps stand out in sharp relief, and his t-shirt — a ridiculous thing, it’s patterned all over with tiny rabbits — rides up a little with the movement. His body is a kind of poetry. 

“What can I get you,” he grins, leaning over the counter and patting a spot that Keith assumes is where he’s supposed to sit. He climbs gingerly onto the tall, backless stool that’s wedged up under the lip of the tabletop and reaches for his wallet.

“Just a coffee,” Keith says. He’s something of a connoisseur of terrible coffee; he collects experiences the same way some people back home collect old postcards. 

Shiro frowns. He looks foreboding when he does, and a little terrifying, even if he’s not serious. His brows are dark and the white shock of his forelock makes him seem older than he probably is. “I can’t do that to you,” he protests. “I’ll get you something special.” He pulls a pint from one of the three taps installed behind the bar and hands it off before Keith can protest.

“Uh,” Keith says. “Thank you.” 

It’s the gift that matters, not whether Keith even wants it. He sips gingerly at the glass, which is clean but wasn’t chilled before liquid was dispensed into it; there’s already condensation dripping down the sides. He gets a mouthful of foam for his politeness and has to lick a little mustache of it off his upper lip. It’s bitter and effervescent, jammed full of the smell of pine-needles; he knows he’s not going to drink the whole thing. 

Shiro watches him for a minute more, before he laughs — the foreboding shadow suddenly gone from across his handsome face — and plants his elbows on the counter so he can lean forward. 

“Tell me,” he says. “What’s a stranger like you doing in a census-designated place like this?”

—

Keith returns to his little shack much later than he anticipated, loaded down with the water tank and an insulated freezer bag packed with a couple of trout. The cabin doesn’t have refrigeration or cold storage, so he and the dog will eat well tonight. 

Shiro had pressed the bag into Keith’s hands before he’d walked back to his car, still parked a little awkwardly near the water spigot. 

“A real welcome,” Shiro had said. He wasn’t smiling this time. He must have noticed that Keith hadn’t finished the beer. “It’s only right, when someone new comes to town.”

“Thank you.”

“I’ll see you around,” Shiro had said. It was the sort of thing most people said carelessly, without thinking. But Keith felt that Shiro meant it, just as sure as Keith felt that tugging sensation of the spirit world nearby.

To Keith’s great satisfaction, the trout are already filleted. He can do it, and he’s even good at it, but it’s a pain in the neck to get the little pin bones out with just his knife. One less step, one less thing to clean.

He buries the remains of his dinner and the dishwater a ways out from the cabin and arranges a pile of stones on top. It’s not possible to pack his trash out to a county garbage pit, not when he’s planning to lie in wait along the Rim for months yet. He lays stones atop the pit and watches the dog nose at them for a while before turning back to camp. 

That feeling is stronger than ever: instead of a tugging in his bones, pulling him in one direction or another, now Keith’s skin is prickling with energy. The hair on his arms and back of his neck keeps rising up at the oddest moments: in town with Shiro, when he unwrapped and cooked the trout. He doesn’t think it’s the altitude, though his heart is racing. Keith knows down in his bones that he’s in the right place, at — finally — the right time. 

—

Six months into the research trip, Keith is habituated to this part of the state. It’s a mix of terrain, full of bluffs and rails studded with scenic overlooks, and monster sightings in equal measure. The elevation is higher than what he’s used to, even with over twenty years of herding the sheep up every escarpment that strikes their fancy. The winter is colder than he expected — the dog surprises him by growing a thick fur coat and taking up semi-permanent residence in Keith’s sleeping bag. He finds that he likes the snow and high winds, even if he does have to scrounge up warmer layers at a second-hand store three towns over, near one of the state community colleges. Mrs. Lee at the hardware store sells him a couple tanks of propane at a discount, possibly so he’ll leave before she has to make eye contact with the sports mascot on his sweatshirt, but he still has to refill them in order to cook or heat anything in the shack. The propane costs eat into his shrinking budget. 

Shiro accosts him a week after the first snowstorm, after Keith has managed to dig himself out of the bigger snowdrifts and grimly pilot the Subaru into town for a propane refill. As always, he’s bright-eyes, larger than life, and wearing an outfit that’s inappropriate for the season: mesh basketball shorts that display an awful lot of leg, worn birkenstocks and a pair of wool socks, and a day-glo pink shirt with “Every Day is Earth Day - Cibicue Elementary School 1996” across the chest in peeling white letters.

“Keith!” As always, his tone is so encouraging, so full of welcome, that Keith feels he might be able to measure up to Shiro’s good opinion of him. 

“Shiro,” Keith answers. He stops in his tracks, still holding the propane tanks, and waits for Shiro to reach him. It’s a blustery day, with the wind screaming through the canyons, and when Shiro gets close enough he acts as a sort of windbreak. Keith appreciates it; his sweatshirt does little to block the chill. 

“You look cold,” Shiro says, and takes one of the propane tanks off Keith’s hands. He often does little things like that, like helping Keith is easy. It’s another one of his gifts, one that Keith feels greedy and good about taking. “Let’s stop by the bar after you get these filled, and I’ll find you some warmer clothes.”

“Won’t you need them for yourself?” Another gust of wind whips through the street; Shiro doesn’t bat an eye, but Keith hunches into himself, trying to become a smaller target. 

“I run hot,” Shiro says. He shepherds Keith into the hardware store for the propane refill, and Keith knows shepherding. He’s surprised that he likes the feeling: Keith isn’t usually the person who’s being taken care of. It feels too intimate from someone he’s known for six months.

After lugging the full tanks to the car and checking the chains on his tires (“you pick up a few tricks after you’ve lived here a while”), Shiro ushers Keith into the previously-unseen back room of the bar. If appearances are to be believed, Shiro lives out of this one room with its camp burner and electric kettle. There's a luxurious chest freezer in one corner, and opposite is a battered recliner not unlike the one Keith’s uncle uses as a bed. 

Shiro retrieves a laundry basket full of neatly-folded clothes. It looks like a more appealing variation of the second-hand store Keith bought his sweatshirt from, or like the lost-and-found section at a school in a district with funding. If the contents are anything like the rest of Shiro’s wardrobe — well. Keith will treasure the gesture. 

But instead of short sleeves or track pants, Shiro unearths a pair of wool leggings — probably meant for a woman, but Keith doesn’t care if they’re wool — as well as a lurid down vest. 

“Is that teal?”

“And violet,” Shiro says, proudly. “It’s in such good shape, I had to grab it even if it’ll never fit me — it’s cool.”

Keith wonders if this is just a regional difference in vocabulary, or if Shiro is older than he appears and thus adheres to a different cultural aesthetic. “Very cool,” he says, and slithers out of his jeans. 

The leggings fit perfectly and are heavy enough that Keith feels immediate relief from the chapped, frozen sensation the wind introduced into his lower extremities. He likes the feel of them: wool is a familiar textile, homey and insulating. Keith has always preferred his clothing to fit closer to the skin, if only to prevent snagging himself on brush and rocks while he scrambles along hiking trails. It’s practical; and if he’s vain about how lean and muscular he looks in tight clothes, well. He’s only human. 

“They suit you,” Shiro says. He looks pleased, approving, like Keith has exceeded a set of already-high expectations. “I’ve got a base layer in here too, come on.”

That’s how Keith finds himself shirtless in Shiro’s little room, shivering still as he turns the capilene baselayer right-side out. He can feel the hair on his arms standing at attention under Shiro’s gaze — Keith pretends it’s the chill, but the sensation is more electric than that. 

Shiro watches Keith dress, slowly, like a reverse striptease. By the end of it, the ridiculous vest is zipped up to Keith’s neck and he’s got a beanie — more spiritwear — jammed over his hair. The hat barely fits, really; Keith’s hair has gotten long and unruly, and it’s always been thick. He probably ought to braid it back so it fits snugly under the cap. 

“Much better,” Shiro tells him. He leads Keith out of his little den, back into the bar. It’s funny; even though Shiro’s back room has windows that face the same view of the rim as the windows by the bar, it still feels like Keith is emerging back into the world after time spent underground. 

Shiro walks him back to the Subaru. The wind has blown new drifts of snow up around the front tires, and despite his sandals, Shiro helps kick the car free so Keith can head back to camp. 

“Thank you,” Keith tells him, once he’s pried the door open and settled in behind the wheel. He’s not sure what the thanks is supposed to encompass, but every time he’s around Shiro, Keith feels grateful. He feels happy. 

Shiro leans down, ducking his head into the open driver’s side window, so he’s almost nose-to-nose with Keith. “It’s a pleasure,” he says, and taps the car lightly on its hood, twice; his big hand leaves a print in the snow, and the engine turns over without a whimper. 

—

Keith’s intuition is still thrumming deep inside him, and he can’t shake the sense of anticipation that floods him every time he walks out onto a new section of the Rim. He’s taken to leaving little gifts whenever he goes out seeking, on the off-chance that the monster is missing some crucial element of being believed in. He leaves things of significance, but not of any monetary value: dyed scraps of wool, or his own fingerprints made with soot from one of his cook fires. Keith knows better than to leave food in the wilderness; mostly, he leaves good intentions. Sometimes, he picks up garbage. 

The Rim isn’t much like things are back on the reservation — nothing, Keith thinks, is much like the reservation — but Keith loves his home more for the people in it than for the actual landscape. He used to spend summers helping his parents with the sheep; if that didn’t endear the land to him, not much will.

Here, Keith has the off-grid shack all to himself. There’s no running water, but there wasn’t running water at home, either. He’s rigged up a solar shower and he drives the old Subaru into town every week or so for potable water and supplies. And, often: a beer. Keith doesn’t drink as a rule, and this isn’t any reason to start, but the guy who runs the tiny watering hole is the prettiest scenery Keith will ever encounter. Keith has only felt more besotted since Shiro rescued him from freezing after the first storm; he wears the leggings and down vest in heavy rotation, and Shiro admires them every time, leaning in so close to pay his compliments that Keith can enjoy the humid, intimate feeling of his breath when he exhales. It’s flattering; Keith looks good in most clothes, but few people can pull off a teal-and-violet down vest. Keith doesn't think he’s one of them. 

By now, Shiro has probably noticed that Keith doesn’t actually drink the pale ale he orders every week, but he doesn’t comment. Keith always leaves a tip, despite his rapidly-dwindling funds. Hopefully Shiro enjoys their conversations half as much as Keith does, even if he continues to ignore Keith’s requests for coffee, no matter how terrible. 

Shiro’s not just nice to look at: he’s _nice_ , in a way that doesn’t jive with what Keith knows about small towns. He wears ridiculous shirts and makes dumb jokes, he doesn’t laugh when Keith talks about his latest hunting expedition, and he’ll answer just about any question Keith could think to pose to him — but he never, ever, talks about himself. Shiro sends Keith back to his site with food any chance he can get, whether it’s more fish or a jar of green salsa or, once, a handful of piñon. Some of these gifts Keith shares with the dog, or leaves as offerings; mostly, though, he accepts them. It’s nice to be at the forefront of someone’s mind.

Shiro’s easy manner is so encouraging that this time, after he’s pulled Keith’s draft and settled across from him, Keith finds himself leaning back over the counter and telling Shiro about what he’s really looking for. Keith has talked sideways and upside-down about petroglyphs for months, hesitant to tell the truth but unwilling to lie. He’s talked about exploring the trails and cataloging the way the land has risen and eroded over the centuries. He’s talked about looking for something, but he hasn’t said what. In this, he and Shiro are alike.

He’s not ashamed of it. Following that otherworldly half-feeling has become his life’s work. Something out there in the Rim calls to Keith, and he’s simultaneously intent on discovering it and protecting it from prying eyes. Shiro is different; something about Shiro is safe. Keith believes in Shiro almost as much as he does the strength of the sensation that brought him out to this part of Arizona in the first place.

“Run that by me again,” Shiro says, once Keith’s talked slowly through the search he’s made so far, detailing the things he left and the feelings that have intensified with every month spent _in situ_. “You hunt monsters?” He doesn’t seem to mean it in a mocking way, or even a disbelieving one. More like he wants to be sure of something.

“It’s not hunting,” Keith answers. “It’s...seeking. And ‘monster’ is only one word for it.” He doesn’t say the words that his parents use; Shiro’s not a white guy, which is another point in his favor if Keith’s being honest, but he’s still a stranger. Even if he’s a stranger with pretty eyes and a nice smile, the kind that crinkles around his eyes like little bird’s feet.

“I like the sound of this,” Shiro says. He likes it so much that he hefts himself up onto the bartop, and then over it, so he’s standing too close to where Keith is leaning against the counter. He hasn’t shown off like that since he first introduced himself, and Keith had almost forgotten that Shiro was — so very, very tall. Keith’s not small, but he’s shorter than both his parents, and he’s always been the lean kind of fit; his muscles are never going to stand out. 

Shiro towers over him, and he seems broader and taller than he did just a few moments ago; his eyes have a strange light to them. It looks almost like a sign of welcome. Keith wants to bask in the warmth of Shiro’s gaze; he wants to undress in it, like he did weeks ago in the back room. 

Keith is surprised that he’s — he’s not afraid of Shiro. Seeing Shiro like this, suddenly more imposing and focused, makes the sensation in Keith’s spine buzz a little, and his belly clenches. It’s unfamiliar; he wonders if this is what arousal feels like.

“There’s a kind of energy around here,” Keith says, slowly. “It’s stronger than I’ve ever felt it before. Other places, it’s just a sense of something having lived nearby, like hearing an echo in a canyon. Ghosts, you know? But it’s more intense out here, like I’m hearing it almost from the source. I go out and listen to it, try to figure out where it’s coming from. Figure out what it wants to tell me” 

“Have you found anything?”

“I haven’t met anyone.” Which isn’t exactly an answer. “And the dog doesn’t care to look.”

“I believe you,” Shiro says. It’s more pronouncement than encouragement; it washes over Keith in a way that feels powerful. “I think you’ll find him, Keith.”

“Him?”

“Have a safe drive back to camp,” Shiro tells him, and doesn’t send Keith home with food this time. 

Shiro does touch him, though; he reaches out and sets his prosthetic against Keith’s shoulder, right over the scar Keith got as a kid when he slipped and fell chasing one of the sheep. He’d come down hard on a fragment of rock and it had torn through his skin, almost to the bone; he still doesn’t have quite the same range of motion as he does on the other side.

Keith reaches up and sets his own hand on top of the prosthetic. It’s warm, warmer than it really should be. It heats him up in a way he’s forgotten since he left the desert. 

“I’m always careful,” Keith says. 

He’s not lying, even if it’s not the whole truth: it’s more that Keith knows his limits, and cars are not one of them. 

—

The Mogollon Rim is the dividing line between Arizona’s High Country and its deserts. It’s a sharp line, and it takes longer to maneuver down from the High Country in the old Subaru than Keith ever plans for, but: where the feeling calls him, he goes.

There’s an old railway line that runs across the edge of the desert, a couple of hours from the edge of the Rim. It hasn’t had any traffic in years, and most of the ties are half-dragged out of the earth, like an animal displaced them in a fit of annoyance or boredom. There aren’t a lot of animals big enough out here _to_ displace a railroad tie, but after tracking down the closest library and scrolling through decades of microfiche, Keith wonders if his creature was responsible.

He’s started thinking of it like that: _his creature_. Keith doesn’t believe in ownership, not really, but this unofficial residency has added something new to the strange pull in his spine, a little whisper in the back of his skull that grows stronger by the day. The Rim and its canyons weren’t meant to stay as empty as they have over the years, and the echoes that hang in the air have a heat to them, a sharp weight. As much as the energy feels like a sound, it also has color; it’s like the red dye his mother makes for the tourist rugs she weaves. Meaning and expediency, all rolled up into some kind of haunting.

Keith is reconsidering his earlier assessment. There might not be a monster in this region at all, just a ghost. The rail line was one of the ones that carried people to the internment camps that scattered around this state and others, and Keith knows that that type of journey — forced, unhappy, tragic — leaves a mark.

He asks Shiro about it, the following week. Shiro knows all of the gossip around the region, to the point where he’s more helpful than a full third of the newspaper clippings Keith’s collected. 

“There was an isolation center near here, at Leupp,” Shiro says. He has a tension about him, an anger that Keith recognizes from watching the old people back home talk to social workers who have no clue what they’re doing. “After the Manzanar riot, they sent people there for _isolation_ — it wasn’t just Manzanar, of course. No due process, just a high security prison in the middle of the high desert. Best anyone can figure out, when the war was over, some people stayed. It’s not like they had much of a home to return to. That’s how my family ended up here, more or less.” 

“Maybe that’s what’s calling me,” Keith muses. He’s not looking at Shiro while he says it because this feels private, like a confession. Leupp is an old wound in the Navajo Nation, one that used to house a boarding school for Diné children. “It’s familiar.”

“Could be,” Shiro answers. He reaches over the bar then, and touches Keith’s shoulder, like he does most visits now; it’s become a habit. “I’ll tell you one thing, Keith; if anyone is going to find him, I believe it’ll be you.”

Keith laughs, a little, and leans into the warm press of Shiro’s hand. Since he left home, he hasn’t been touched by anyone except for Shiro and the dog, who occasionally pushes him out of bed. Keith’s not a tactile person. He’s gone from living in his parents’ house and dancing around each other in the small shared space, avoiding the butting lambs, submitting to the gentle scruffings of his uncles, to a solitary existence — Keith’s not surprised that he’s imprinted on Shiro, even if he thinks he would have been attracted to him anyway. Shiro’s like the sun: Keith feels like a plant that turns to follow him, keeping him in view for as long as possible. 

“I hope I find it soon,” Keith says. “Or that it finds me.” 

Shiro’s hand squeezes his shoulder _hard_ , almost like a reflex. He shouldn’t be able to do that; the prosthetic he’s got isn’t that advanced. “Well,” he says. “In that case, I’d better remind you to believe in yourself, too.”

—

A few days after that, right about the time Keith has rearranged his diagram for the day and started going over his budget, Shiro trudges up to Keith’s door. There’s no indication that Shiro drove out this way, and he hasn’t made any footprints in the earth leading up to the little shack, either. He’s just there, beautiful and a little gilded by the fading light. 

Keith wasn’t expecting him. More to the point: he didn’t think Shiro knew where Keith’s been living.

The dog welcomes him easily enough, shoving her nose into Shiro’s outstretched hand and then, as dogs tend to do, his crotch. Keith notices that Shiro keeps his prosthetic back from the dog’s face. 

“She won’t bite,” he says, by way of greeting. He’s more reserved than the dog, though he’ll admit to himself that her approach has its own appeal.

“I know,” Shiro says. He gives Keith one of those smiles that don’t much change the shape of his face, except for the movement around his eyes. “That’s why I offered my hand.” 

He’s looking bigger than Keith remembers again, like his shoulders have broadened out from his cropped NASA tank top. Shiro never dresses in accordance with the weather, and even with the spring thaw sweeping through the plateau, his outfit is inappropriate. Torn between worry and desire, Keith decides to ignore his concerns about hypothermia in favor of enjoying the landscape of Shiro’s muscled belly, the sharp furrows of his hip bones. 

The dog loses interest pretty quickly, which is just as well. Keith is greedy for Shiro’s company, greedy for having Shiro on his own turf. 

“I didn't think you knew where I was staying,” he says. He almost feels like he’s flirting, or teasing, except Keith doesn’t know how to do either of those things. 

“It’s not hard to figure you out.”

There’s not much he can say to that, so Keith doesn’t. Instead, he invites Shiro in.

The sheet is on full display, the fabric pinned with photocopies of headlines, snippets of oral testimony, and threads held in place by one of the fancy embroidery knots Keith learned out of boredom when he was in elementary school. Shiro walks right up to it and uses his prosthetic to flatten the fabric against the wall at its topmost edge; he’s so much taller than Keith, it’s the only blank space available.

“You really have been seeking,” Shiro says. He sounds — pleased. 

“I don’t know how much is my being able to find it versus how strongly it’s calling to me,” Keith tells him. He looks away, rubs at the back of his neck; he’s not embarrassed. This is the most personal place Keith’s ever been, and he wasn’t expecting it. 

“A little of column A,” Shiro says, dropping his hand from the wall and placing it against the small of Keith’s back. “And maybe a little of column B.”

Keith can’t help but lean into the touch. It feels heavier than when Shiro touches his shoulder, as if Shiro is certain of something and determined to demonstrate it by increasing the pressure. If he presses any harder, it might actually hurt; Keith feels a thrill at the thought. Shiro is not going to hurt him.

“Let’s go for a walk,” Shiro announces. The dog scuttles across the floor and takes up residence in Keith’s sleeping bag, as though the word _walk_ is entirely unwelcome. Keith’s too dazed to really take note; he zips up his terrible vest, grabs his hat, and away they go. 

—

They don’t take the car to the trailhead. It’s not winter anymore, but it’s not spring either: the sun started setting a while ago. Shiro’s white hair glows in the dark, though that might be the few early-season fireflies swarming around him; he looks like a will-o-the-wisp. They walk, crunching through muddy drifts of icy snow and passing the occasional brave wildflower. 

For some reason, even though he’s hiked this way before and knows the terrain, it takes no time at all to arrive at a part of the Rim Keith hasn’t ever seen. That’s not, in and of itself, remarkable; the Mogollon Rim is over two hundred miles long, and there are thousands of trails Keith has never set foot on, and couldn’t set foot on even if he’d been living here his whole life. 

Shiro hasn’t lifted his hand from Keith’s back at all, and the ground blurs beneath them. The proximity is delicious. Keith hasn’t felt the cold at all since they left his shack. When they stop moving, Shiro lifts his hand, only to touch Keith’s face, to trace at the circles beneath his eyes. Shiro usually tells Keith to get some sleep when Keith leaves the bar, but now he seems satisfied that Keith is awake and looking up at him. 

“Keith,” Shiro says. “You were looking for something.”

Keith waits for a moment: for another, for a third, until Shiro laughs into the silence and puts his flesh hand at Keith’s waist, and holds out his prosthetic like an offering. 

“Keith,” he says again. Then, “you’ve found me.”

He’s growing taller again, and his prosthetic — it’s not a prosthetic at all. Instead of the familiar silicone skin and its blurred doodles, Shiro’s arm is just as strong and whole and muscular as the rest of him. Except that he has claws now, and that instead of skin his arm looks more like a void, partially filled with stars. Before Keith’s eyes, the color bleeds out of Shiro’s hair, and his face takes on a more angular shape; even his ears are changing, becoming even larger and sprouting tufts of fur.

Keith turns into the lee of Shiro’s body, because even if he hasn’t felt the cold since Shiro touched him, winter lingers at the top of the Rim; Keith’s only wearing a baselayer and that vest over his wool leggings, and Shiro runs warm. He wants a closer look at Shiro’s arm, and on top of that — the pull he’s always felt at the base of his spine has drawn taut, and he feels as though he’s been roped closer to Shiro’s body. Like if he stepped away, Keith would be pulled in two. 

“Here you are,” Keith whispers. He’s never heard his own voice sound so tender before, not even when the dog was a puppy who wouldn’t stop trying to suckle at Keith’s fingertips. He looks up, and up: Shiro looks so much the same, despite the arm. His eyes are a deep gold, and there’s a faint purple light gathering about him — or maybe emitting from him; it buzzes against Keith’s skin where they’re touching, and reminds him, comically, of the violet trim on the vest Shiro gave him. 

He’d like to see what else has been revealed about Shiro’s body; he’d like to touch _more._

Keith sets his hand flat against Shiro’s chest. He’s got scars on his body, the way some trees get when they’ve weathered lightning storms, but his heart beats strong and steady and calm beneath his tank top. Keith can feel his own pulse settling down to match. 

“You’re not talking,” Shiro teases. His smile is so wide and sharp, so _fond_. “I thought you’d have something to say when you found your monster.”

“Are you really a monster?” Keith asks.

Shiro sighs out a long breath and wraps his starlight arm around Keith’s shoulders. This feels even better than mere proximity. “It depends on who’s asking.”

“Me,” Keith says. He hitches up higher, stretching onto the tips of his toes in order to put his arm around Shiro’s shoulders in return, and attempts to drag Shiro’s face down to meet his own. “I’m the one who’s asking.”

“In that case,” Shiro says. “I’ve been alive a long time. But my grandparents did come here, in a way, so I’m also just Shiro, the guy who owns a bar.” He slides his flesh hand down from the small of Keith’s back and hitches him up, resettling his grasp beneath Keith’s ass and around one thigh. This does make things easier, Keith thinks; easier to lean in close, to smell the unsettling, inhuman energy gathering in the dusk. Easier to tell secrets. 

“My family took the train from California,” Shiro whispers, nuzzling close so his cheek is pressed against Keith’s, so Keith can feel his breath, “even though they hadn’t done anything wrong. They lived in cages in the desert for years and then one day the prison doors opened and they were allowed to leave. But something stayed.”

Shiro is not a ghost. Shiro is not a monster. Shiro is not a simple bartender. Shiro is all of these things, just as much as he’s a man-shaped creature who tells bad jokes and laughs at Keith’s resting sheep face and who never passes up the chance to offer Keith a gift, as if Keith were the one in need of being remembered. 

Held like this — hoisted, really — Keith’s close enough to kiss Shiro, so he does. It’s sweet, he thinks, closing his eyes and pressing close. Keith’s never kissed anyone before, and hasn’t spent much time wondering what it would be like. Shiro makes a little noise of pleasure and —

Shiro presses him against the trunk of a pine tree. The sap is going to be hell to wash out of his clothes, but that’s not at top of mind now. Keith can’t help but notice that Shiro has grown bigger still, taller and broader and stronger than he’s ever appeared when he was standing behind that bar countertop, offering beers that Keith wasn’t drinking. He was plenty big to begin with. Now, there’s a strain in Keith’s hips as he hugs his legs around Shiro’s body, and when he kisses him — Keith’s vision is blurred from how close their faces are, from the purple light bleeding over them, from the intensity of his desire. Still, he’d have to be blind not to notice that like this — kissing him, holding him up against the tree — Shiro has teeth, and claws, and his gold eyes keep slitting open like a cat, or a lizard. 

“I’ve been lonely,” Shiro confesses. He’s a creature made of hope, and anger, and ruined dreams; it makes sense that he stayed in a tiny dot on the map that doesn’t even have a library, just like it makes sense that he runs the only bar for miles. People who are starved for stories often end up in bars; that’s partly why Keith doesn’t drink. 

Keith struggles to keep a tight grip on Shiro’s broadening shoulders. 

“I’ll keep you company,” he promises. It’s maybe rash of him to do so, but Keith is only methodical to a point. He bites hopefully at the edge of Shiro’s jaw, hisses when Shiro does the same — his teeth are so, so sharp. 

“You’re bleeding,” Shiro says, and licks at the wound he made. “I’ll fix it.”

“Does that mean I belong to you?” Keith asks. He’s glad Shiro has already left a mark; he hopes it’s a sign of marks to come.

Shiro laughs at that, and it dampens some of the solemnity of the moment, some of its intensity. “Blood pacts don’t work like that.”

“Mending people does,” Keith argues. Shiro loosens his grip and Keith drops down a bit, his body dragging down Shiro’s chest in a long, compelling slide. Keith feels utterly transported, even if he never moves from this spot, even if he never sets foot outside of Shiro’s embrace again. 

“Do I need to be fixed?” Shiro asks.

“Maybe I do,” Keith tells him. “I was looking for something. That’s why I’m here.”

Shiro traces the edge of Keith’s cheek with his starry fingers. His touch burns a little; Keith almost hopes it’ll leave a mark. “If you fix something,” Shiro murmurs, “it means you settle in. It means you stay.”

Keith was born and raised on the reservation, but home is a people, not a place. Home isn’t walking up a hill and trying to keep track of twenty-odd sheep, nor is it the tedious labor of making crafts for his mom to sell at the big fair over the border in Shiprock. He’s felt empty his whole life — not bereft, but waiting to be filled.

“I could stay,” Keith says. The words feel odd in his mouth; he’s never said anything like them. He’s never _wanted_ to.

“Oh,” Shiro says, and he sounds delighted.

His happiness is sudden and has a physical reaction: the icicles clinging to the needles of the pine he’d pressed Keith up against begin to melt, even though by now it’s fully dark out. He’s glowing more too, and the sheer strangeness of it is compelling. Keith didn’t realize that he was lonely as well, not until Shiro confessed the same. Now, elated at having found him, Keith can’t stop touching. He’s never felt the call of a physical body before — it’s always just been that feeling — and Shiro’s joy is contagious. Keith wants nothing more than to touch him, and keep touching him. He wants to memorize the body Shiro has revealed by touch; he wants, desperately, to be touched in return. 

Keith whispers all this in Shiro’s pointed ear. He feels bold, confident. “Don’t stop touching me,” he says. 

“Be careful,” Shiro whispers, and he gathers Keith closer still. Keith is overwhelmed by the size of him, by the furred shape and the odd not-feeling of Shiro’s starry arm about his waist. “I might keep you forever, if you talk like that.”

—

Keith drives the Subaru back into desert country, to the edge of a county dump, and leaves the keys in the ignition for whoever comes along next. It still runs. Someone might need it, and Keith doesn’t anymore. Then he slings his pack over one shoulder and walks to the nearest gas station, the dog trotting along beside him. Her tongue lolls out of her mouth as she moves, a humid doggy grin; it’s warm enough in the desert that, even though it’s still early in the season, her thick coat is threatening to shed. Keith doesn’t look forward to waking up to handfuls of it clinging to his clothes and getting in his mouth, though he can’t say the thought of Shiro’s body — covered lightly with fur of his own — is similarly off-putting. 

When he finds a pay phone and dials in his phone card information, the dog rushes around him three times in a lopsided oval before coming to rest atop his left foot, just like always. 

Kolivan picks up on the fourth ring. “How’s the journey?” he asks. In the background, Keith can hear the staticky blur of diner-sounds: Thace cussing gently at the pastry crust he’s rolling out, the clatter of Kolivan stacking clean coffee cups in a methodical pyramid next to the percolator. 

“I found him,” Keith answers. 

“Found home, too,” Kolivan comments. Then, surprisingly, “Your mother’s here.”

Krolia doesn’t like going into town and likes going to the diner Kolivan owns with his partner even less. When she comes to the phone, she has that sticky-mouth sound to her voice that indicates she was lured indoors by one of Thace’s pies. 

“Will you bring him to meet me?” she asks, no preamble. Then, “the barn you built last year is still standing. That’s good work.”

“We could come,” Keith offers. “But we wouldn’t stay.”

“I’ve never expected that of you,” she says, which is as good as saying _I love you, Keith_. His mother: sometimes she seems carved from stone, and all the softer for it. “Your father will miss you on the line, not that the two of you did much talking.”

“Hard to,” Keith agrees. 

“Anyway,” Krolia continues on. “The sheep miss you. Do you still have that dog?”

“She’s keeping me in line,” Keith promises, at which Krolia lets out a sharp _hah_ into the receiver on her own end; the crackling sound is almost exactly like when she used to blow sharply into his ear to get his attention, back when he lived in her house. 

“That dog has never kept a body in line if she could avoid it.”

There’s quiet for a moment, punctuated by the noises in the background on both Keith and Krolia’s ends: the sound of an RV hitting the edge of the curb and riding up over it as the driver attempts to pull into the gas station; the scrape of Krolia’s fork against the undoubtedly-chipped plate her slice of pie was delivered on, and the out-of-tune drone of the jukebox Kolivan pretends to hate but will never consider removing from the diner.

“I love you, Mom,” Keith says. Fact, not a confession; he’s said it before. 

“You’re a good son,” she says back, almost a croon. Her voice dips too low to hear for a moment, then picks back up. “I’ll see you when I see you. Call Thace when you’re on your way.”

“He still the only one with a phone?”

“That too,” Krolia says. “But mostly he might bother to make a pie if you’re the one calling. I like peach.”

When Keith hangs up the phone and turns back to the road, Shiro’s waiting for him. Like before — as is becoming wonderfully normal — he’s on foot but has left no footprints. At this lower elevation, his summer clothes look almost appropriate, even if it’s still not quite warm enough for a sleeveless shirt. This one has an Arizona tourism slogan splashed across it, accented by a revealing tear just beneath Shiro’s left nipple. It’s unfair. Keith has spent more than twenty years largely immune to the finer intricacies of the male form, and here Shiro is, blasting that track record into oblivion. 

“How’s your mom?” Shiro asks. As soon as Keith is in range, Shiro reaches for him and reels him in; Keith can’t complain about how hot his otherworldly boyfriend is, since he’s handsy enough to assuage Keith’s embarrassment. 

“Same as ever,” Keith says. He’s too distracted to give a decent recap; Shiro’s just copped a feel, and the sensation is delightfully juvenile, even though Shiro is pretending his hands are a regular human size. “Hey, now.”

“You like the way I touch you,” Shiro says. But he adjusts his grip and bends down to kiss Keith properly, a little hello. In public like this, he appears within the standard range of tall; Keith quietly prefers the way Shiro presents at night, or when they’re alone, but kissing is easier when there’s less than a foot dividing them. 

“How do you feel about visiting my parents?” Keith asks a while later, once Shiro lets him up for air. “There’ll probably be pie.”

“I’ll have to find them a gift,” Shiro muses. “Maybe it’s time to take you hunting with me.”

“They’re not fancy,” Keith says. In the next breath, Shiro’s started walking in that strange, distance-blurring way he has: he moves more slowly when he’s off the Rim, but he’s still faster than most humans can travel outside of a vehicle. 

“You’re fancy,” Shiro says. “Like a diamond. Bright. Does your mother like diamonds?”

“She likes sheep,” Keith says, firmly.

**Author's Note:**

> [Leupp](http://encyclopedia.densho.org/Moab/Leupp_Isolation_Centers_\(detention_facility\)/#Leupp_Isolation_Center) was used as an isolation center for Japanese Americans during WWII; many prisoners were held there without charge or trial. 
> 
> Prior to its use as a prison, it was a boarding school for Native children. The boarding school system for Native Americans in the United States was a form of genocide, the ramifications of which are still visible today. 
> 
> Title is an extremely brief reference to the Sherwin Bitsui poem “[Dissolve](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/146224/from-dissolve).”
> 
> I wrote this based on prompt 32, "keith is a cryptozoologist who just moved into a small Arizona town to research on strange sightings in the desert. bonus for monsterfucking, size difference; you can have it pg but lean heavy into desert cryptid Shiro and determined fringe scientist Keith (think of him as the guy in the shack talking about energies and his board)"
> 
> Keith's father is named after Chester Nez, a Navajo Code-Talker
> 
> Keith's secondhand leggings are from WoolX. Shiro's shirts are, lamentably, fictional.


End file.
